Compelling Content the Key to Every Link Building Campaign

There’s no form of link bait better than a site that’s inherently link worthy on its own. By that, I mean a site that provides some sort of tool or database so compelling that bloggers and readers alike find it particularly fascinating or useful in a major way. The best such example in my own personal life as a basketball blogger comes from the basketball scouting service mySynergySports.com.

Synergy offers an amazing tool in which users can watch video clips and statistical breakdowns of any NBA game broken down to such minutiae as every play this season in which Amare Stoudemire finishes as the roll man in a pick-and-roll. It also provides detailed stats on how players fare in different situations — so you can see that Hedo Turkoglu was fantastic spotting up for jump shots but terrible in isolation plays during his stint with the Phoenix Suns earlier this season.

This is an incredibly valuable tool for basketball bloggers to be able to break down teams and players with this degree of detail on both a player and team level as well as to watch particular situations in particular games to see how teams defended a star player, for example.

What’s just as obvious to the seasoned link builder is how valuable the basketball blogging community can be to Synergy. Synergy can target popular basketball blogs as well as mainstream writers by offering a trial of their product with the expectation being if they find the product useful then they will cite Synergy as the source of their findings via a link in any story in which Synergy data is used. In this way Synergy can obtain highly targeted in-content links from the very people who spend the most time writing about their industry.

Along with the obvious benefits from a link building perspective of accruing so many authoritative in-content links, such reports may pique the interest of basketball blog readers, who just happen to be the kind of people who would want to invest in a Synergy account of their own.

Synergy takes it a step further by tweeting out links from stories that cite their stats, promoting the utility of what they offer to an even larger community and in a sense receiving free advertising through these stories. Few do it better than Synergy as far as natural link building campaigns that rely solely on the intrinsic value of the content produced.

In my own link building efforts at Vertical Measures, I have found clients that offer something useful or interesting garner the best links through manual requests. Nobody wants to link to your product page, as pretty as it may be. Websites must offer something compelling to link to, and even if you aren’t a repository of basketball knowledge that can be sliced and diced many different ways you can create a piece of content that will make you stand out in your own industry.

From there, like Synergy, you can reach out to your brand evangelists for links and publicity that can help your link building campaign tip. In this way, awesome content can be the difference between a successful link building campaign like the one run by Synergy and campaigns that rim out.